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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MGibster" data-source="post: 9207781" data-attributes="member: 4534">My working theory is that we don't really know why things are successful.  If anyone really understood what made something so popular, they'd be able to crank out hit after hit and we wouldn't have any John Carter of Mars or Blade Runner situations (sadly neither movie did particularly well when originally released).  Fear not, stalwart friend, I am not here to poop in the thread, as it's certainly interesting to at least try to figure out how something gained such popularity.  As was I.  In some ways I suppose it makes sense.  There were only 226,000,000 Americans in 1980 and there are about 309,000,000 in 2010, so potentially there is a larger audience for the game today.  That doesn't really explain why D&D is so popular, but having a larger pool to draw from can't hurt.  I'm not surprised it's more successful than 3rd edition as the late 90s was one of D&D's low points I think.  While I think D&D 3rd edition was successful, I don't recall a broad cultural impact like 5th edition has had.  Other than the original D&D movie in 2000 of course.  This is a tough nut to crack.  I don't know.  I can talk about why I think D&D is the #1 RPG, but I'm not sure what it's so much more popular now than it was in the 1980s.  One big difference is that portrayals of D&D in the media are more positive now than they were in the early 1980s.  i.e.  You won't find a whole lot stories about D&D being harmful to young people in most mainstream news outlets.  Names like Dallas Egbert, Pat Pulling, and Tom Hank's Mazes & Monsters just aren't part of the zeitgeist these days.  Is it possible more Americans are open to different types of games these days?  Board games have been part of mainstream American life for decades, but there was a Video games rose to prominance in the late 1970s, but there was a renaissance in the late 1990s with the introduction of games like Settler's of Catan.  I don't mean to boast, ahem, but we played Catan at my bachelor party in 2000.  A few years later Catan was being sold in Walmart, Target, and other big box stores.  Then there's video games which gained mainstream popularity in the 1970s.  Young people who got into D&D 5th edition starting in 2014 likely had parents who were more comfortable with gaming as a whole than parents were in 1982.  Even if those parents didn't play D&D, they were less likely to have any reservations about their kids playing it or any other game.</blockquote>

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